1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network communications and, more specifically, to secure mobile communication architectures.
2. Description of the Related Art
The recent explosion in the growth and availability of mobile devices (e.g., laptops, PDAs, and intelligent cellphones) combined with increasing corporate and government concerns with secure communication of confidential business and intelligence data has created a genuine interest, and probably a good business case, for efficient, mobile, security solutions that would allow “road warriors” and others to communicate securely with each other and with network-based resources (e.g., corporate servers, intranets, and secure web sites). The diversity of relevant devices and networks includes 3G wireless networks, wireless LANs, dial-up connections, broadband voice/video/data networks, and wired LANs.
Current attempts to provide such solutions generally depend on natively insecure network protocols such as mobile Internet protocol (IP), IP version 4 (IPv4), and IP version 6 (IPv6) overlaid by end-to-end security protocols (e.g., Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) IP security (IPSEC)). They also include link-level solutions such as Microsoft's extensible access protocol (EAP), which is directed toward protecting roughly the last 30 feet of a link (e.g., between a wireless subscriber and a wireless LAN port access entity (PAE)). These efforts have resulted in complex solutions characterized by non-interoperable, heterogeneous systems with complex interfaces and multiple authentication/encryption solutions inefficiently layered one on top of another.